About six to eight months ago Mike Hutchinson (designer of Gaslands) showed me an idea that he had, a solo skirmish wargame called ‘Perilous Tales’. I checked it out, it was good fun, the AI system needed beefing up and it was fairly bare bones, but it was fun. Mostly it was something that Mike wrote for himself and wanted to share with me as a friend. Since then he’s kicked it around, shipped it around publishers a little (you’d think that the author of one of the biggest se

Skirmish games have what I call generic rules. I hate generic rules, I hate writing generic rules. I’ve written so many versions of line of sight it makes me sick. What I hate even more though, are games made up of nothing but a stitched together set of generics. To help you skip to the good bits, and to recognise if you game is nothing but a patchwork of generics, here are the generics of skirmish games laid out. I generally have these rules internalised and pick and choose

That’s an appealing collection of words for a title, right? For those unaware, those unpleasant sounding terms are all things that can happen to game systems over time, I’ll take a second to explain what they mean, or at least what I mean by them. Bloat is when more and more content is added to a game with additional releases, usually additional forces, over time. The result tends to end up being either forces that are significantly generic because the necessity for new units